Miyamoto denied the inclusion of Nintendo characters in Galaxy 2, chances of Donkey Kong as main villain in a new Mario game
Here’s a bit of Super Mario Galaxy 2 development trivia for you: the game could have featured Nintendo characters.
According to director Koichi Hayashida, there were proposals to include characters from the Big N’s other franchises – like Donkey Kong or Pikmin – but Shigeru Miyamoto was very unsupportive of the idea. Miyamoto felt that there needed “to be a functional reason to include characters of a certain type in a game.”
Hayashida said:
“One of the early proposals that we discussed for Super Mario Galaxy 2 was the possibility of including characters from other [Nintendo] franchises. For example, you might have Donkey Kong or Pikmin show up. We presented this to Mr. Miyamoto, but he came down pretty hard, saying that there has to be a functional reason to include characters of a certain type in a game. He went to specify precisely why the Pikmin wouldn’t work. In the Pikmin games, you’ll notice that all the Pikmin are very thin — tall and narrow for their frame. Mario enemies tend to be on the short and squat side and there’s a functional reason for that. They’re easier to stomp on. They’re lower so you can get above them and broader so you can land on them. In that sense, Pikmin are just not well suited for the Mario universe.”
Hayashida also answered a question regarding the possibility of Donkey Kong becoming the main villain of a Mario game again.
His response:
“If we encountered a situation with a proper gameplay context, we would consider it. Let’s say if we were building a level and functionally it called for someone to throw barrels at you, then Donkey Kong would be appropriate. But now that I think about it, maybe we have a situation where, at the end of Super Mario 3D Land, Bowser throws fireballs at you from the end of the stage. And we didn’t use Donkey Kong there… so…”
